What is an accessible Web site?
How do we design accessible Web sites/
Building accessible Web sites is more about effective document management than adding access features for people with particular impairments.
Before we address the question of what an accessible Website is let's ask the even more fundamental question, what is a Website? dictionary.com offers the following definition:
"A set of interconnected webpages, usually including a homepage, generally located on the same server, and prepared and maintained as a collection of information by a person, group, or organization."(http://www.dictionary.com)
Ok a Website is a set of interconnected webpages that somebody has got to maintain - so what's a webpage? Again from dictionary.com we get:
"A document on the World Wide Web, consisting of an HTML file and any related files for scripts and graphics, and often hyperlinked to other documents on the Web."Hmm - so a Web site is just information that has been collected together and presented as a set of interconnected documents. These document are located on a Web server and are available to any internet enabled device. Please read that last sentence again (go on, I'll wait for you). It is important because it tells us that:
- There is no magic or sleight of hand involved; Websites are just sets of connected documents
- Building and maintaining a Web site is at heart a document management task.
- Documents must be capable of being read by client programs such as Web browsers.
Designing accessible WEbsites is not about desing sites for disabled people
Design for Machines not People - surely not? Here is a useful idea to think about it: creating accessible Web sites is not about designing sites for disabled people; people don't send requests for Web pages to Web servers - computer programs do. Am I being overly pernickety? Perhaps so, but adopting this approach frees you up from the notion that you must remember to add features to ensure access for disabled people; to thinking that you must avoid adding features that will get in the way of programs that can help disabled people get access to the information. Most of the time the program is a Web browser - but we can't count on that - in the future, as we have seen it might be an automomous search agent or some internet enable device we haven't even thought about yet. Here is a quote from Hal Abelson and Philip Greenspun - writing about the software engineering course they run at MIT: "On a purely practical level, we have to consider that five years from now people will laugh if a student shows someone an application that can only be used from a Web browser. An engineer should know how to build an application that is useful from the Web, from a mobile phone (WAP), and to a human who wishes only to speak and listen." ( this was taken from a draft) If we are designing for machines rather than humans we need to be much more careful about structuring the information in our Web pages. In practical terms that means making sure we use HTML as it was originally intended; as a way to markup the structure of documents. By structure I mean the headers, paragraphs, list etc that make up all documents. HTML of course stands for Hypertext Markup Language. An understanding of what HTML is for, how it works and why it[base ']s a good idea to use it as intended I will get to shortly. I am happy to admit htat there are more powerful markup languages than HTML - but HTML is not as Philip Greenspun writes, [OE]almost worthless for defining document structure[base ']. For the purpose of making information easy to publish, and capable of being accessible to disabled people, as we will see in later chapters, the structure that HTML imposes on a document can mean the difference between accessible and inaccessible infomation. If you take my argument to it[base ']s logical extreme we would not store our documents as HTML at all, but as structured and well labelled text held in some kind of database (including the file system). We could then generate HTML, XML, PDF, Microsoft Word or whatever other format you can think of on the fly. But this requires tools and systems that are not yet mature - and although it is clearly the best way to go for information that has already got a well defined structure e.g., stock control information or medical records, it is only half the answer for the more loosely definde information that makes up the majority of the Web. Today we have HTML and it has, to state the obvious, taken off in a big way. Let[base ']s look at how we can make the most of it.The importance of writing standard HTML
We can be sure that when my 13 year old nephew Sean built his skateboarding Website he did not spend much time anxiously poring over his HTML to make sure it was standards compliant. But the fact that someone so young can build his own web sites tells us that: building Websites can't be all that difficult; most Web browsers are very forgiving when it comes to dodgy HTML, WYSWYG editors have helped to make the Web a two way experience. So if it si so easy and Web browsers are so forgiving, then why learn how to write standards compliant HTML? (Seans website is not critical to the survival of a business or the affectiveness of an online education programme)- Syle sheets will not work correctly
- Browsers are lilely to display =your colde inconsistently
- Internet enable devices such as Web tv, games consoles ect mway not be able to display your page at all.
A significant contribution to the accessibility of the internet can be summed up in three words: Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).4 What does that mean? Not much, unless you are already familiar with publishing information on the internet. A basic understanding of hypertext markup language is, luckily for us, relatively simple to grasp - and once grasped can take us a good way along the path to understanding why the WWW is such a boon for disabled people.
HTML is one of the topics we are going to explore shortly, but first a tiny bit of history which is relevant to our purpose. We need to know a bit about how the World Wide Web came about in the first place.
Tim Berners Lee was the man who come up with key elements of the World Wide Web5 . He was a researcher at the European Centre for Nuclear Research in Geneva (CERN) and was interested in finding ways to ease the [OE]flow[base '] of documentation between researchers from different institutions - even when those institutions where miles away from one other.
The internet had existed and been in continuous development since the late 1960s so one part of the problem was already solved; the ability to connect distant institutions together and transport information between them6 .
What had not been solved was how to overcome the fact that the institutions all used different types of computers, different software controlling those computers, and incompatible ways of [OE]marking-up[base '] (don[base ']t worry I[base ']ll explain this phrase later) and storing their documents.
What Lee felt was needed was a way to exchange documents which would satisfy three elements;
- Work on any computer.
- Be able to use the internet.
- Be easy to learn and implement.
In short, he recognised that what was needed was a standard way of formatting and distributing documents.
The promise of HTML and the World Wide Web is described by Tim Berners Lee as [base "]human communication through shared knowledge[per thou]7 . Human communication through shared knowledge - yes that sounds good, and it is, but we can[base ']t share knowledge if we don[base ']t speak the same language. Or more accurately if our computers don[base ']t speak the same language.
It was this fundamental problem which Lee saw as as being at the crux of the matter and what got him thinking about solutions back in 1979/80. But it wasn[base ']t until 1990 that he coined the term World Wide Web. This was the name he chose for the first hypertext browser he created while at CERN.
Text Markup Language
The idea he came up with was a simple one8 (and to be honest not entirely new). Divide documents into their different elements: headings, paragraphs, lists, blockquotes etc. Then come up with a simple way of labeling each of these elements which could be interpreted and easily understood by all computers. In other words what was needed was a standard (and simple) way of logically [OE]marking-up[base '] the structure of documents.What is meant by [OE]marking-up[base '] a document?
An examples should help. This document you are reading is extremely simple in its structure; consisting mainly of headings and paragraphs and the odd quote or two. The main heading is at the top of the page and throughout the document there are several sub-headings. To distinguish these from the text I have made the headings bold, sat them on their own lines and made them a bit bigger than the rest of text. Paragraphs, the other structural element of this document are, simply put, bits of text which have carriage returns after them. Now as we all know computers are stupid and only know what we tell them - so how do they know the difference between the elements in a document unless we - hugely intelligent humans that we are - tell them. The World Wide Web uses a standardised way of doing just that by putting additional instructions in with the normal text (i.e the normal text being the bits you and I read). This way it can tell the difference between a heading and a paragraph or indeed any other element of the document. When it knows this information it can display the [OE]structure[base '] of the document appropriately on the screen. Here[base ']s an example of marked-up text for use on the web:
<H1>The Biggest Heading on the Page </H1>
<P>
It is difficult to think up something to put in a paragraph when you are not really talking about anything but just want to illustrate some point. If I just write another bit it will make it a long enough bit of text so that it looks like a reasonably sized paragraph.
</p>
<h2>A Sub Heading for my imaginary document </h2>
If I fed this to my web browser it would say (if it could speak) [base "]Ah something I understand, this first line is to be formatted as a large Heading (in fact the largest heading of the possible six I have available) and that next bit is to be formatted as a paragraph, I better put some space after it. Finally I[base ']ve got another heading a wee bit smaller than the first one.[per thou]
Do you see the pattern here? Instructions to the computer telling it how it should lay out the text are contained in what are called tags, e.g. <H1> is a Header tag, <P>, is a Paragraph tag. Tags are a letter or more representing some formatting or structural feature, such as H for Header, or P for paragraph or EM for Emphasis which are enclosed by chevrons < on the left and > on the right.
The idea is that you have an opening tag which signifies that the next piece of text is a particular type of element in the document ( i.e a header, or a paragraph or a list or a quote) or formatting element (such as italics or bold) and a closing tag. The closing tag indicates that this feature is now to be turned off. Closing tags have a forward slash just after the left hand chevron. So to sum up; you open a tag, (e.g <P>) put the text in, and then close it ( </P>)
Even the lowest powered computer if it understood these basic rules could reproduce the structure of any document marked up in this way. If it was really old and feeble it might not be able to make the headings bold or indent any quotes it came across but it could use it[base ']s own capabilities to indicate the structural meaning of the document in some other way, i.e it could find some way to indicate to the human reader the difference between a paragraph a heading and list. More modern machines could use their power to enhance and highlight the documents structure - reproduce all the subtleties of the formatting and make it nicer to look at and easier to read.
Ian S. Graham in his book [OE]HTML Stylesheets sourcebook[base '] describes HTML thus,
[base "] HTML Documents as simply structured, platform-independent containers of information[per thou](page2)
Thanks Ian that[base ']s what I call concise.
When Tim Berners Lee was putting all this together he wasn[base ']t particularly concerned by how a page of information would look. The priority was the development of a dependable and easy way to exchange documents while still retaining their original meaning. Presentation and design were secondary considerations.
Following some simple rules should mean that a document could be displayed by just about any device (i.e platform independent) as long as it can convert the marked-up text into format appropriate to it[base ']s capabilities - whether that be graphics, text, sound or for that matter braille. The system used for marking up these documents was christened, Hypertext Markup Language or HTML for short.
Why does that make it accessible?
So now we have some idea of what is meant by [OE]text Markup[base '], but what about the [OE]Hypertext[base '] bit. The term [OE]hypertext[base '] was coined in 1965 by Ted Nelson and at its[base '] simplest means [OE]text which contains links to other texts[base ']9. Rather than get into a more detailed explanation - which if you are interested you will find in chapter 2 of this guide - I would like to explore the implications for accessibility of what we have learned so far.
Why does this new way of sharing documents makes information more accessible than before?
Let[base ']s look at a simple example. As we have seen, HTML was designed to mark-up the structure of a document. It was also used to indicate how the various elements related to each other, e.g. a piece of text marked-up with an <H1> tag would be bigger than that with a <h2> tag, which again would be bigger that text marked with a <h3> tag.
We have tags which indicate the relative size and also the relative importance of these headings. The word relative is significant here - what has not been done is to dictate absolutely the sizes of these headings - as would have been the case if the document had been created in a word processor, printed out and handed to you in paper form.
There is an important point we can tease out in this scenario. Using HTML to mark up a document in the way originally envisaged by Tim Berners Lee means the creator of the document does not dictate how it looks, he/she just marks it up to delineates its[base '] structure. It is the user of the document that has the power to decide just how it should be formatted, i.e. how big the text should be, or what will be the colour of the background and text, or indeed what type of device should be used to display it.
For example, if I have a visual impairment this last point is very significant - perhaps I can read text if it is above a certain size or has good contrast between the text and the background. The way pages on the web are marked up gives me control of these variables - all I have to do is adjust the preferences on my web browser, so that I can read each web page I download. As a result I potentially have access to just about every bit of text information on the internet - recent counts put that at about 320 million indexable web pages!
That is just a simple example but it illustrates the key point; HTML as originally envisaged allows the creation of documents which do not have their presentation/design hard-wired in. Thus all the decisions about what is the most appropriate presentation of the document is left to the user.
This has implications also for the creator of such documents - there is no longer the same pressure to create multiple copies of everything in order to ensure that information is accessible to people with a wide range of impairments.
If you increase the number of devices that are capable of interpreting and presenting information formatted as HTML then it seems obvious that the accessibility of that information is increased.
But, I hear you say, how does the internet increase the accessibility of information and services for all the other disabled people who are not blind or visually impaired? Surely it doesn[base ']t have anything to offer someone who is, for example, a wheelchair user?
Good point, but think of it this way. Are there buildings that wheelchair users would find difficult to get into? The answer is yes plenty of them. Do some of the organisations which work in these buildings have information which would be of interest to a wheelchair user? The answer again is yes. How does a wheelchair user get hold of that information?
One route would be if the information was published on the internet. Now there is no need to visit the building!
Another question. How could a wheelchair user get employed by one of these organisations?
Internet technology can be used (and is) for communication and exchange of information within organisations as well as outwith them10 . It is relatively easy for employees to work remotely and still [OE]plug-in[base '] to on-site databases, web sites and e-mail systems.
Within an organisation documents no longer need to be physically moved from floor to floor, from department to department or from person to person. A wheelchair user doesn[base ']t need to go upstairs to deliver or recieve a document, it can now be delivered electronically. Communication and sharing information can also be done electronically. Physical barriers have just been taken out of the equation. This means wider employment opportunites, less excuses for rationalising prejudice from employers and more chance for disabled people to get a job and avoid poverty and social exclusion.
Problems, what Problems?
It all looks good up to this point; HTML gave us the ability to exchange information between different types of devices and increased the accessibility of that information. Things however have changed a lot since 1990 and not all of it has been good for the user.
Academics drove the original growth of the World Wide Web and as a result this gave it a kind of [OE]hippy[base '] noncommercial, [OE]keep it pure[base '] type of feel. But that has all changed over the last three or four years as the World Wide Web has become a [OE]hit[base '] in the commercial world.
[base "]It[base ']s a hit and it has, as they used to say back in the punk days of 77 [OE]sold-out[base ']; been seduced by the dubious temptations of layout and formatting control, dazzled by the shiny baubles offered by the world of multimedia, and bullied into a new shape by the commercial need for web pages to be as [OE]attractive[base '] as possible to maximise visitors and therefore, advertising revenue.[per thou]11
HTML for Presentation?
The strengths of the original conception of HTML also turned out to be it[base ']s weakness for many publishers. Writers and designers don[base ']t just want people to understand the text and structure of their web pages they also want those pages to look good! The standard HTML tags placed restrictions on their ability to achieve this. After all HTML was never created for design work.
The manufacturers of Web Browsers responded to the pressure for more control of how a web page looked by providing extensions to the HTML language. Marc Andreesen of Netscape started the ball rolling when he introduced the <img> tag so that people who used Netscapes[base '] web browser could display graphics on their pages.
The use of HTML by many authors page layout rather than imposing structure to a document has led to a debate12 . On the one side you have the purists who argue that writers should stick to HTML standards as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium so that the resulting document can be interpreted and displayed by all computers and all standards compliant browsers.
On the other side there are those that say that communications is not just about words and document structure, communication is as much about page design as the meaning of the words on the page. David Segal in his article [base "]the Web is Ruined and I Ruined It[per thou] writes,
[base "]Layout is presentation. Presentation is layout. Apply one set of layout rules and the get The New York Times. Apply another set and get The Village Voice.13 [per thou]and later,
How much information does Nike give out about its products? Not a lot. On the commercial side of the Web, design can make millions of dollars of difference[per thou]
This is a difficult one because both arguments are right. Communication is about more than the text and document structure. But if in achieving the goal you discriminate against a proportion of the population then this just isn[base ']t an acceptable situation.
The standards body on the Internet [OE]The World Wide Web Consortium[base '] (W3c) (http://www.w3.org) has recognised this dilemma and has developed and promoted a variety of technologies , techniques and strategies to solve some of the problems.
"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." -- Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director
The W3c has set up the [OE]Web Accessibility Initiative[base '] which has developed a set of guidelines for building accessible web sites. You can find the guidelines along with many more useful resources at http://www.w3.org/WAI/
The approach taken by the W3c is to ensure accessibility by promoting the correct use of HTML, advocating the separation where possible of content from layout and building the features of HTML which aid accessibility e.g. provide alternative text descriptions for graphics.
W3c point out that making the web accessible to disabled people benefits everyone. The number and types of devices that are now connecting to the web is increasing rapidly; televisions, telephones, personal digital assistants, household appliances.
Many of these devices will not be controlled by keyboard or mouse e.g. hands-free in-car information systems or speech controlled personal organisers. A good example is the latest [OE]Palm[base '] personal digital assistant (PDA) which currently dominates the market for small personal organisers. It has a built in radio receiver which which allows users to connect to the internet and use e-mail:
[base "]The Palm VII organizer uses a wireless connection and the new Palm.Net[dot accent] wireless service to enable users to easily obtain information from the Internet, conduct e-commerce transactions and send and receive instant messages.[per thou]14
The Palm personal organiser has a small low resolution screen and doesn[base ']t have much memory. Multimedia driven websites which have not been optimized for accessibility are unlikely to be of use to anyone accessing the web via their Palm organiser.
Organisations designing their website to be accessible to variety of devices will be the first to benefit from a new growing market of customers. In effect web sites which are accessible to disabled people are accessible to everyone.
Potential publishers on the Internet have a duty to ensure that the information they provide will be as accessible to as a wide an audience as possible. Publishing documents on the World Wide Web is at least a start down this road. In a later chapter we will look at how you can do this yourself.
Ok lets flesh this idea out a bit. Accessible Websites are Web sites where the information on them is accessible to many different devices connected to the Internet. Some of these devices are being used by disabled people; braille reader or voice enabled browsers for by people who are blind or visually impaired, keyboard driven interfaces for those who can't use a mouse, switch technology for those who have limited coordination. In my ideal future - what are the implications thinking like this? Well the first thing is that we should strive to format all our documents in a highly structured way - in a database for example - and with every bit of text given an appropriate and useful label. We should forget about lumping in the information about how it should look with the content - in the ideal world this is the job of the client program. That's not to say we shouldn't supply a few useful suggestions in the form of style sheets (in case the client program doesn't have any of it's own). Documents are then delivered and transformed in real time to the required format. in response to request - in a way that fit's the bill for that particular device. Ideally all the processing or transforming should be done by the client end. The server delivers a well structured document with or without suggestions for presentation contained in a style sheet, the client device can choose to use it's own style sheet to add the prefered presentation - or run the structured document through a program that will turn it into a PDF or a print friendly document or a simple MS word docuemnt. Combination of XML and a persistant storage system (i.e a database or a file system) fits the bill to a large degree. But that's the future we need to be practical and we need to use HTML. So how do we use HTML and is it up to the job. HTML still gives us a lot of flexibility if we use it correctly - HTML is a structured markup language, i.e it's primary purpose is to markup the structure of a document. ( headers, paragraphs etc - see my earlier article) Problems - presentation and structure get mixed up - less flexible, less efficient. But - HTML for structure, Style sheets for presentation (core style sheets) An efficent system is one where maintain a single document and present it in the way that is appropriate to all of these devices. WE want to deliver flexible documents but we want to minimise the amoutn of work involved and maximise the number of different formats we need to create. How do we do this? What are the demands: people don't request documents from Web servers, software running on Internet enable devices request documents. When the request comes in it either contains information about how it want the information formatted ( server side formatting) or it grabs the information in a generic format and sorts out the formatting itself ( client side formatting). Demands: Individuals with particular impairments, Internet enable devices, ( story about workshop) Text is the lowest common denominator What do we need to know to solve this document manageme problem? We need to understand what HTML is. Why it is important to use it 'according to the specification' How HTML, despite it's weaknessess, can help us solve our problems. And how in real terms this can make information more accessible for disabled people. What is HTML see: http://www.ispn.gcal.ac.uk/accsites/wwaccess.html In a later chapter I will discuss just what systems and tools you need to deliver deal with this content management job. In the meantime a few more ideas about accessibility. I will go on to look at the details of designing for people with specific impairmetns but I think it is wrong to think of accessibility purely in terms of whether or not a Web site can be accessible to disabled people. In my opinion if you are doing it right You should not be thinking of the access needs of disabled people seperately from yoru general aim of delivering your information that will be accessible to evryone and everything that is internet connected and can understand HTML. As a general rule if you are designing your Web pages using Standard HTML, i.e. you are using Markup to provide structure to your document. And you are using style sheets to provide formatting and presentation - then your pages will be accessible to everyone,, including disabled people - most times with very little further work. Here's a powerful idea: The computer I am typing this on has a keyboard, a mouse, and a monitor. The first computers I used didn't have any of these. It was basically just a big calculating machine - and it wasn't that easy to get information into and get results out of it. I'm giving my age away here but when I went on a course in the late 70s as part of the drive to train more people to cope with the rising demand in the growing computer industry my training involved learning how to punch holes on cards - containing the information that would be fed into the computer - contained within those holes was both the . The results I got back from the computer were written on large sheets of 'computer paper' . The cards and the sheets of paper where the way I comunicated with the computer. The cards with the holes in them where my input device and the computer paper was my output device. Today I communicate with the computer using a keyboard and a mouse and read the results of my input from a screen. My point is that keyboards, mice and monitors are only one way to interact with a computer - they happen to suite me because I my vision is good, I can touch type, and my hand eye coordination is good. There is nothing natural about communicating with a computer using a mouse, keyboard - this is just one method - today there are a lot of peole who spend their entire days talking to their computer - they talk ,and the comptur takes notes. Over the years I have met many people who communicate with their computers in ways that suite them (James Gallagher story) use other I punched hoes The Web was designed to be accessible from the start - the whole idea was that it would solve the problems that I am taling about in this chapter; how do you deliver a document to someone who is using a different computer system as you and retain the meaning of the doucment. Here is a quote from Hal Abelson and Philip Greenspun - writing about a software engineering course they run at MIT, "On a purely practical level, we have to consider that five years from now people will laugh if a student shows someone an application that can only be used from a Web browser. An engineer should know how to build an application that is useful from the Web, from a mobile phone (WAP), and to a human who wishes only to speak and listen. Many of our students have already built projects with WAP interfaces and the adaptation to WAP usually only takes an evening or two. We've as yet only done one student project with a voice interface. All the students need to become, uh, conversant with VoiceXML and more advanced speech processing systems (see http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/vxml/). "http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/teaching-software-engineering.html Teaching Software Engineering (* draft *) -- lessons from MIT by Hal Abelson (http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~hal/) and Philip Greenspun (http://philip.greenspun.com) Hal Abelson a and Philip Greenspun are not thinking about the needs of disabled people here - but they are certainly aware the future is not just about delivering services to a Web browser. In doing so they are trying to solve the same problem that is at the centre of building accessible Web sites; designing flexible systems to cope with different publishign needs and differetn 'clients'. Why should it not be accessible, what makes it accessible, let's define accessibility? And these documents need to be created and maintained. A Web page then is a document, more accurately and HTML document; a document whose structure is defined by the use of Hypertext markup langauge. contains text, images, and multimedia elements - usually about a particular topic. these pages are linked together - and there can be links on any of these pages to ay other page, image, mulimedia element on the. How to think about disability on the Web : Dundee. Two things: An accessible Web site is one that can be accessed by a multitude of different Internet enabled devices. Designing the informatin so that it will be accessible to people with particular impairments/used in partiular environments - Dundee idea about disabilit ynot beeing an either or thing we are all on a scale somewhere ( temortary disability - brake a leg, ) as we get older our eyesight fails, our hearing deterioriates (especially if you a have spent a lot of your youth listening or playing extremely loud music), our reactions get slower - etc Let's put some meat on the bones of this idea. Workshop asked participants to name as many devices as possible that they had heard of being connected to the Internet. I had been asked by the seminar organiser to do some that was intereactive. so Trying to be smart - I published my slides on a Website, the workshop would be done in a lab full of connected compputers - and set up the Web pages so that they could be edited via the browser by anyone at the seminar. I decided that to make my central point which was that accessibility is not just about making your information accessible to disabled poeple but it is about making your information accessible to all devices. I got a volunteer to edit the empty page on the WEb site header : devices connected ot the internet, asked th participants to think of as many things they could think of that they had heard of being connected otthe Internet - and got the : List included: The point I was trying to make was that if we are thinking about accessibilitry purely in terms of the impairments of disabled people - this is too narrow an approach - think of accessibity: from tehpoint of view of building and managing your Web site - and a way of publishing information that can be delivered to any device; write once publish on anything. Turns out I was just to smart - the cache system enable din the college meant hta although the page had been updated - when everyone refreshed their pages - they still gothte old version. Another lesson learned - another punchline ruined.problems - mAccess and impairments
personal stories and case studiesAnn Hamilton - from Mithcell Library - quote from worldwoman Web site. James Gallagher, Bruce McGuire, person who came to see me who works in college suporting blind students. Definition of accessible ac·ces·si·ble (k-ss-bl) adj. 1.Easily approached or entered. 2.Easily obtained: accessible money. 3.Easy to talk to or get along with: an accessible manager. 4.Easily swayed or influenced: accessible to flattery. Online course on building accessible Web sites: Week 3 diversity of access http://access.idyllmtn.com/d201/sample/
"Browsers and Assistive TechnologyReading: http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-UAAG10-20010409/uaag10-summary.htmlUser Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 summary, by the W3C WAI user agent working group.Read over this introduction to UAAG. http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-UAAG10-20010409/uaag10-chktable.html UAAG 1.0 Checklist, by the W3C WAI user agent working group Skim this. Note that this is written for a very technical audience; one which routinely programs web browsers! There are a lot of things in this document which I don't even understand fully. You should be aware of this document and what it's about, roughly, but you won't be expected to know the details in the way that you (as a web designer) should learn WCAG. The discarded bits: Ability to deliver documents to multiple devices in multiple formats efficently Accessible Web pages then must be lean and 'client friendly' - free from too much presentation information - and coded using standard HTML. We want to deliver our Web pages so that everyone will be able to access them. Everyone in the world is different and has different preferences. Do we strive to meet all those preferences - by . How do we deliver information in An inneficient although admitedly accessible system is one where you strive to maintain seperate documents for every type of device and person that you want to deliver your informatin to - one for WAP phones, another for people using Braile readers, another for people useing WebTV, yet another for peole using voice. Each Web page will contain the same content but will be formatted differently: some will have high quality photographs , ( for coleagues on the local Intranet), some we just format as text, because that is the best way to ensure access to people who are blind or visually impaired, some we write for people who are colour blind - by selecting particularly contrasting colour schemes - and so on down the list untill we have exhausted all posibilities. To do this of course we would have to employ an entire team of people - all of whom would have to be experts in their own field (how else are we to find out the best colours for people who are color blind). It is a good Website: it has lots of pictures of Sean with his skateboard; instructions about how to do skateboarding tricks; and information about his likes and dislikes. Unlike most Web sites it has got a clear purpose and meets the needs of the target audience (in this case his friends).
Not everyone uses the same browser to access the Web, nor do they use them in the same way. This week we'll look at how a diversity of different people access web sites, including an overview of assistive technology for people with various disabilities and an introduction to the W3C's User Agent Accessibility Guidelines. "